WILLFUL NEGLIGENCE
It’s far too easy to live a non-challenging life. Let me be clear about what I mean by this.
As humans created in the image of God, we have a responsibility to make use of every gift and skill set we’ve been blessed with to nourish, enhance, and uplift the lives of others (Proverbs 12:27 NLT). One of those very gifts is the complexity of the human mind; a small piece of God’s creation so mind-blowing that for any person to willfully hold back from striving for increased knowledge and wisdom indicates a negligence to fulfill God’s will through us.
Willful negligence is one way of many that people choose to live unchallenged by the purpose they were created for. The non-challenging life is one where purpose (faith), meaning (beliefs), and value (morality) are significantly less applied by those living it.
MADE OF MORE THAN VOLITION
People have a plethora of variables playing multifarious roles in whether or not they choose to carry on with their lives in any particular way, but it all starts in the heart and mind. We’re not only made of our volition, we’re made of the soul behind the will.
The mind, being as powerful as it is, can become so severely cut off from what is good and fruitful that it completely divorces itself from our understanding of our own essence; which is to say, it divorces itself from belief in the fact that we are made in the image of God, and therefore capable of achieving anything we place our faith in God’s will manifesting itself through our lives to do.
DESIGNED FOR INTIMACY
What follows is how crucial it is that we consider the existence, capacity, and relevance of the soul. While I don’t have the space to write at length about reasons why we should believe in the existence of the soul here, what I can say is that our soul is unquestionably designed to experience the deepest intimacy.
We can know there is soul intimacy because the soul is the core of who we are, and acting as our core, our soul is meant to be intimate with God. Talk about “‘soul’ purpose”! (Play on words) It is the fundamental floor that our identity rests upon. And since it was created by God Himself, this clarifies why our soul needs Him and why it causes distance, confusion, and incompleteness (a break of intimacy) when we deny or resist Him.
PROTECTING INTIMACY & GIVING FROM ABUNDANCE
Because of our vast spaciousness for intimacy, the argument then amounts to the fact that we don’t have a legitimate excuse to pull back from our pursuit of discovering and protecting intimacy.
And yet we fail to discover this intimacy by a number of diversions, one of which is the excessive attention we sacrifice to our devices; our phones, TVs, and computers—as well as unproductive, unhealthy relationships or habits.
If we are so capable of more, and if we are meant to grow in intimacy with God Himself, then we must be ignoring a God-given quality laying dormant in our hearts since many of us are simply not operating from spiritual overflow.
SHOWERING THE WORLD WITH COMPASSION AND UNDERSTANDING
Many of us merely function, moving through life as though the core of our experience were a display of disappointment and boredom about being alive altogether. From that frame of mind, there’s little to no ambition to understand, and certainly none to help (inspire, encourage or heal) a spiritually unbalanced world. There are people closed off from the abundance that could be—through their faith—showering the world with a real sense of compassion and understanding that only comes from the Christian worldview: seeing God in control, saving us from ourselves through Jesus Christ by renewing our lives back to Himself by His grace.
SETUP APART UNIQUELY FOR A GOD-GIVEN PURPOSE
God chose each of us for a different, unique purpose, set apart from anyone else. But we won’t know or understand this the same way if we’re not a believer in Christ; not yet connected to the Holy Spirit, nor living a life of repentance, obedience, and faith. Furthermore, we won’t find some of the answers to the deepest, most troubling questions we have about our existence if what we’re seeking is grounded in the world, and not in the Kingdom of God.
FAITHFUL WITH OUR TIME
From an abundance, comes overflow. We are not meant to hoard, cling to or hover over what will eventually die here anyways. We would be more productive to consider that our lifespan being as short as it is only adds more substance to the argument that we are literally designed to be more focused and faithful with our time, energy, and resources by pursuing a life where we submit ourselves to God as a conduit for the Holy Spirit to work towards others; that all would be blessed and overcome by the outpouring of the Lord through us, to one another.
THE TRENCHES OF LESS THAN, AND IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION
It’s devastatingly easy to be distracted by menial, artificial, shallow vices. Men and women alike are astonishingly and swiftly wooed by the demonic spirits lurking behind the temporal whims of a world in pursuit of our sanity, authenticity, and innocence.
We desire true intimacy with the God of purpose, moral objectivity and justice (otherwise we would be quite satisfied lying stoic in the trenches of depression, injustice, and hopelessness), but instead of following that desire, we deviate and search for transient pleasure in places and situations where immediate gratification guarantees our most important needs will not even be acknowledged, let alone satisfied.
ALTRUISM OVER HEDONISM
A more challenging lifestyle would involve the human heart dedicating the necessary time introspecting and prayerfully evaluating its beliefs, understanding the fundamentals of those beliefs, and determining through subservience to the Holy Spirit whether there is more work to be done to refine our core values before even considering ways to produce pleasure in our lives.
In other words, before we consider hedonism, we need to consider altruism, in name of Jesus.
DEFINING TERMS AND UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES
We must find our way towards understanding what lies beneath our own definitions. If we cannot bring clarity to who we believe we are (even if that looks like humbling ourselves by accepting how little we understand about what makes any single person unique beyond DNA and biology), then we cannot initiate a mental journey aimed towards discovering what transcends everything we understand about the very reality outside of our undefined, elusive self.
Put another way, if we can’t identify who we are at a deeper level, how can we know and recognize our selves against the backdrop of a complex, ever-evolving world, far more interminable and perplexing than our self-ambiguity?
NUMBING OURSELVES TO AN INESCAPABLE REALITY
It’s easy to live a life without deeply considering the minutia that makes up the ambience of the life we refer to as reality. We tend to more naturally act out numbing ourselves. But numbing ourselves doesn’t erase the truth that there is something there that we try to erase in the first place, over and over, time and time again.
The mere fact that we must continually repeat an unnatural, unproductive, unhealthy habit in order to escape something innately inescapable, should reveal something of the nature of the thing we keep trying to hide from. If our external reality is so real and so unable to be permanently put aside, why try to continually hide it with lies (drugs, sex, alcohol, gambling, etc.) rather than come to terms with the reason behind our sense of need to erase it?
A SPIRITUAL UNDERSTANDING OF OUR EXISTENCE
That’s the challenged life, you see. To face it rather than hide it or attempt to erase it.
It’s easy not to do this. It’s easy to lift the drug or the bottle to our lips. It’s far too easy to hide a secret in private. It’s far too easy to ignore (but not turn off) or to numb our deepest longings for a spiritual understanding of our existence and suffice with barely functioning, like a tranquilized animal.
On the other hand, what’s easy about the challenged life is… we aren’t hiding anymore. There is no journey towards escapism or avoidance. The reason this is easy is because there is no painful return to what we’ve stepped back from. We’re nearly always in the position to be able to face the challenge directly, without a veil concealing our clarity. In this way, we’re better prepared to process through information (feelings or thoughts) that would otherwise become the very reason we believe we want to return to numbing out (aka: returning to our folly/”vomit” Proverbs 26:11-12).
A MORE PREFERRED OUTCOME
The productive, healthy and prolonged virtue of being capable, and therefore willing, to emulate a lifestyle of growth in every facet of our character, is that we are ready to experience the very intimacy we long for beneath every aspect of the journey leading up to its manifestation.
Choosing an unchallenged life leads to lack, and it begins with denial as a consequence of a weakened desire to work towards a preferred outcome. Why the weakness of desire? There’s a high likelihood we have not had engrained into our psyches the substantive power of becoming disciplined in associating feelings of reward with the journey of pursuing the experience of short-term discomfort for the sake of long-term maturity, wisdom, and spiritual boldness.
BASELINE FOR NAIVETY
To miss this point outright is a baseline for naivety itself. But to not be curious about the process reflects a type of mental laziness, and to avoid it is tantamount to self-deprecation. Why would we not desire to be the best version of ourselves through maximizing our capacity for embodying—at its peak—what it means to be a human, made in the image of the biblical God?
A CONSEQUENCE OF THE ENTIRE PROCESS
More humans than not are choosing the easy way to live, which is to say they are choosing to function, but not to truly live at all. We cannot be fully alive and not care. We cannot breathe and ignore that the breath we have as a blessing from God. We cannot think with focus and intention and abuse the privilege it is to have conscious thought, choices, and feelings, along with the ability to glean pertinent data from numerous external factors all acting concordantly for the purpose of galvanizing us into taking action as a byproduct of that entire process.
It’s another way of saying we want the air in our lungs, but for the purpose of tuning out and not actually doing anything meaningful with our lives reaching beyond the border of our ruminations. The difference we could be making in the ever-hardening hearts of people would end with the neuronic electricity generating in our brain.
DIFFERENCE MAKERS MAKE REALITY REAL
This is far too easy. It’s more beneficial to live a challenged life. To think more and feel more; to do more than merely exist. We could make an impact on a society that wants to witness others living a particular way before they do it themselves. I see people watching other people, but they’re not learning, they’re judging.
There are too many people waiting for the skies to open up instead of living; people waiting for others to be more compassionate. But the mature adult who sees the reality of the world at large understands with godly wisdom and clarity that in order to have that preferred experience, we must do it first. In order to see it before our eyes, we must pursue its source, which is God’s Kingdom.
That must be our destination, or we will not find it.
KINGDOM OF THE SELF
“Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” (Matthew 6:33) This Scripture wasn’t written without purpose! To live a challenged life is to first acknowledge that the opposite pathway is fallible and incomplete. Recognizing this is the first step towards finding incentive to seek God’s Kingdom, because we know the kingdom of the ‘self’ won’t last.
Once we can step outside the walls of our imploding kingdom of the self, we can start our journey towards truly living by reading Scripture, prayerfully submitting the God’s authority, and allowing the Holy Spirit to utilize in fullness the God-given complexity and depth of our mind and soul.
GOD’S PURSUIT OF OTHERS THROUGH OUR FAITH
We cannot give what we don’t have, and without the Holy Spirit, what we have in order to give has a limit. When we pursue the Kingdom of God, we quickly learn that the abundance of God is endless, and that God’s pursuit of others includes working through us by our faith, which is complemented by the truth that we don’t go by ourselves into the hearts of others—we go with the influence of the Holy Spirit at work in us insofar as we’re surrendered by faith.
SEEKING GOD’S KINGDOM LIKE CHILDREN
The challenged life means we don’t sit still and wait for others to love us first. We don’t wait for others to show us a certain behavior before we exhibit those very behaviors ourselves. If we expect others to be adults, we must host the party ourselves by the power, influence, and movement of the Holy Spirit in us, to move a world out of bad habits and into a community of mature adults who seek God’s Kingdom like innocent children: humble, God-fearing (revering), compassionate, curious, and joyful.
What is a changed heart if we don’t embrace and personify these qualities that the Holy Spirit integrates into our souls by faith?
THE CHALLENGED LIFE ENDS DIFFERENTLY
What is the worth of a non-challenged life when our very existence lays open-ended in stoic disarray, disappointment without any hope of resolution, and incompleteness without clarity over why our heart is aching? Believing in only what we want as we want it is as convenient as it is unfocused and misguided. Believing in what’s real—in what lies before us in history, in truth, and in spiritual rebirth through Christ—is only way we live a life that has quality and quantity. This is the life where stress is a tool to learn from, where trauma is a scar to wear with a quiet sense of pride that points to Christ’s resurrection work in our lives—a full restoration of our soul from death to life—that while appearing impossible and beyond comprehension—is miraculous, real, and true.
The challenged life comes with scrapes and bruises, stress, and adversity, but it coexists with unending joy, peace beyond human comprehension, and eternal life. Why live any other way?
CONNECT WITH ME
If this article spoke to you, please write about it in the comments below, or let me know by sending me a message through my contact page. You can also subscribe to my blog, and/or follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and Pinterest if you’re interested in reading newly published articles. Please let me know if there’s a topic any of you would like me to write an article about that would help you on your faith journey. Thanks so much for reading!
Image by Arifur Rahman Tushar from Pixabay
